An oft-repeated tale in the annals of modern jazz has it that bebop was born at Minton’s Playhouse in New York City in 1940, where the house band included pianist Thelonius Monk, drummer Kenny Clarke, trumpeter Joe Guy, and bassist Nick Fenton. (See, among other sources, David H. Rosenthal’s fine book, Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965, Oxford UP 1992.) Rosenthal quotes at length a passage about bebop from Ross Russell’s novel The Sound (1961), in which Russell writes, “It [bebop] seemed to reflect the turmoil and insecurity of the war years. At the same time it implied a profound contempt for those who had been foolish enough to become involved with the war” (13). If bebop was connected to the wartime mood of the 1940s, and (following Amiri Baraka) with frustrated black hopes in a desegregated America which adhered to the principle of “freedom for all” as well, the post-bebop form of jazz referred to as “hard bop,” emerging in the early years of the Cold War, was influenced by the post-war rise of R&B. Incorporating blues and gospel elements, hard bop, according to jazz expert Michael Jarrett, “combines the melodicism and crisp rhythm attack of r&b with harmonies and minor modes associated with bebop” (Sound Tracks: A Musical ABC, Volumes 1-3, 239). Largely associated with jazz musicians such as Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Cannonball and Nat Adderley, Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson, and with labels such as Blue Note and Prestige, hard bop “provided bohemians with a soundtrack for living” (239). The first important hard bop recordings roughly coincided with the popularization of rock ‘n’ roll, and 50s hipsters found in hard bop records an alternative soundtrack to the music of pop-oriented Top 40 radio. For those such as myself born in the 50s, hard bop (and cool jazz) formed the soundtrack to many of the television shows that form my earliest memories. For hard bop signified, in the words of Michael Jarrett, “fast cars, loose women, hard drugs, shady deals, and weak or addled minds” (239).
Friday, February 19, 2010
Hard Bop
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Common Cause
Monday, February 15, 2010
Hill of Beans
The opposed values of individual expression and group cohesion were often enacted, dramatically, as duty vs. desire. A classic wartime film in which the tension between duty and desire is dramatically enacted is, of course, Casablanca (1942). In the film’s climactic scene, Rick is faced with a choice that also happened to correspond to the need to resolve an ideological contradiction: should he allow Ilsa to go with her legal husband, Victor Laszlo, or keep her with him in Casablanca? The film demands the audience choose between love and romance (desire) or duty to a higher cause (getting Laszlo to Lisbon).
RICK: Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.
ILSA: But what about us?
RICK: We’ll always have Paris. We didn't have. We lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.
ILSA: When I said I would never leave you—
RICK: And you never will. But I’ve got a job to do, too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.
It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world—in other words, the woman must be sent away. Rick’s “hill of beans” line is a virtual restatement of the quotation by Eileen M. Sullivan that Fussell cites in Wartime: “There was no room in this war-culture for individual opinions or personalities, no freedom of dissent or approval . . . .” (195). Interestingly enough, the ideological need to value social duty over individual desire corresponds to the wartime need for sexual abstinence and deprivation, yet another form of personal sacrifice that was needed to win the war.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
The Sing-Along
Fussell also notes that if they were not about sexual abstinence and self-denial (individual desires, as were personal opinions, counter-productive), they were about nothing at all, e.g., “The Beer Barrel Polka,” AKA “Roll Out the Barrel.” Most of the hit songs containing vocals were communal or intended as sing-alongs, such as “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” To make his point clear about the function of music during the war, Fussell cites Eileen M. Sullivan: “There was no room in this war-culture for individual opinions or personalities, no freedom of dissent or approval; the culture was homogeneous, shallow, and boring” (195).
Friday, February 12, 2010
Stuck In The Muck-O
The late Robin Wood’s Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan (Columbia UP, 1986) contains what I believe to be an extremely valuable discussion of the “ideological shift” that characterizes the American cinema of the 1960s. In Chapter Two, “The Chase: Flashback, 1965,” Wood argues for the significance of Arthur Penn’s The Chase (filmed 1965, released 17 February 1966) as “one of the most complete, all-encompassing statements of the breakdown of ideological confidence that characterizes American culture through the Vietnam period and becomes a defining factor of Hollywood cinema in the 60s and 70s” (23). The Chase was one of those big, epic-length Sam Spiegel productions featuring a “major Hollywood cast”: Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Angie Dickinson, E. G. Marshall, James Fox, Robert Duvall, Miriam Hopkins, and other well-known figures. Wood admits The Chase is rather “crude and obvious” in its socio-political commentary (its critique of racism, bourgeois hypocrisy, conflicted attitudes toward the law, etc.), but nonetheless finds its special strength in being “the first film in which the disintegration of American society and the ideology that supports it (represented in microcosm by the town) is presented as total and final, beyond hope of reconstruction” (23). While I agree with him in his view of the film’s historic importance, and think the film extremely worthy of critical scrutiny, I think his claim that The Chase is “the first film” to represent the American ideological disintegration characteristic of the Sixties is debatable. I’d make a case for George Axelrod’s Lord Love a Duck as the first such film, but since it and The Chase were released virtually on the same day in February 1966, I’m unable to do so. The two films share few features in terms of story elements or characters, but like The Chase, Lord Love a Duck is also a representation of American ideological disintegration, and equally as compelling as The Chase, but is more contemporary in style. (Penn didn’t adopt a contemporary style until 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde). Interestingly, both Penn and Axelrod were born the same year, 1922, and were virtually the same age, Axelrod being the older by slightly over three months.
Axelrod, who died in 2003 (biographical details here), came to prominence as a consequence of writing two Broadway hits of the mid-50s, The Seven Year Itch and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?; both were later made into successful Hollywood films. He wrote the screenplays for, among other films, Bus Stop (1956), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and, perhaps most famously, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). He was therefore not primarily known as a director, directing only two films during his career, both in the late Sixties: Lord Love a Duck (1966) and The Secret Life of an American Wife (1968), the latter sharing a family resemblance to Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967), in which a housewife (Anne Jackson, who played the child psychiatrist in Kubrick’s The Shining), in order to prove to her husband that she’s still sexually desirable to other men, begins an affair with a famous movie star. Neither one was critically nor commercially successful, and sadly, their failure brought an end to Axelrod’s motion picture directorial career. Too bad, because I think Lord Love a Duck to be one of the very best films of the 1960s; in fact, I would place it near the very top of my “best of” list of the decade.
According to the IMDB, The Chase was released theatrically on 17 February 1966, although it also indicates a different date for its New York premier, which occurred on 19 February. Serendipitously, Lord Love a Duck was released, this again according to the IMDB, on 21 February 1966—four days after The Chase, and while this may lend credence to Wood’s claim that The Chase has pride of place as the “first film” to represent a disturbance in American ideological confidence, the matter of a mere four days is irrelevant. While I haven’t done an extensive analysis, I suspect both films were being shot simultaneously, during the summer of 1965. I do know that The Chase wrapped by mid-August 1965, because I recall reading, in one of the many biographies written about the Fondas, that soon after the film's official wrap, Jane Fonda married Roger Vadim, the wedding occurring on 14 August 1965. I have no definitive filming dates for Lord Love a Duck, but it had to have been filming roughly at the same time as The Chase. The crucial point is, however, that there doesn’t seem to be any possible influence, of the artistic sort, of one film on the other; it’s therefore a matter of thematic convergence rather than direct influence, and that is what is important. I must also mention that both films were based on previously written material, The Chase on an unsuccessful 1952 Broadway play by Horton Foote, while Lord Love a Duck was based on a novel by Al Hine published in 1961.
In order to demonstrate how The Chase enacts, in dramatic fashion, the collapse of essential American ideological values, Wood, ingeniously, compares features of Penn’s film with those of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), a film made roughly 25 years earlier during the pre-World War II days of Hollywood’s so-called “Classical” era. Following E. H. Gombrich, Wood calls these features “schemata,” and they serve to reveal the changed cultural and historical conditions in which each film was made. I make no claim to have invented these schemata—I take them from Robin Wood’s enlightening discussion of The Chase, borrowing them from him in order to reveal the ideological collapse Lord Love a Duck dramatically enacts in a similar fashion. Relevant pages in Wood’s book are pp. 20-23. Note that these pages refer to the 1986 edition of Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan. The book was later revised, updated, and reissued, but I have not had the opportunity to read the revised edition.
1. “The male authority figure, the symbolic Father, repository and dispenser of the Law, combines myths of individualism and male supremacy that are central to capitalist democracy, enacting the functions of control and containment.” In Young Mr. Lincoln, it is, of course, the figure of Lincoln that embodies these values. In Lord Love a Duck, there are no commanding male authority figures. The authority figures are inept, ineffectual, and seemingly perverse. Barbara Ann Greene’s (Tuesday Weld’s) father, Howard, (Max Showalter), in one of the film’s most perverse moments, is revealed to have incestuous desires for his daughter, shown moaning, growling, and snarling as his buxom daughter models for him various cashmere sweaters. The high school principal, Weldon Emmett (Harvey Korman), is a masochist who can scarcely conceal his sexual interest in Barbara Ann, fetishizing her by means of her cashmere sweater, the color of which she tells him, provocatively, is “Peach Put-Down,” suggesting the masochistic nature of his desire. In Bob Barnard’s (Martin West’s) case, the Father is dead. And Alan “Mollymauk” Musgrave (Roddy McDowall), the film’s anti-hero, has no family, living here and there—“around,“ he says—in various places. “I stay with people.“
2. “In Young Mr. Lincoln Ann Rutledge dies but lives on as the protagonist’s spiritual support (it is “her“ decision—the stick falling toward the grave—that sends him to study law. The myth of woman as man’s supporter/inspiration/redeemer is of course long-standing.” In Lord Love a Duck, Barbara Ann’s parents are divorced. Her mother, Marie (Lola Albright), is vain, alcoholic, and promiscuous, indiscriminately picking up men at her place of work, a bar, where she works as a waitress dressed rather like a “Playboy Bunny.” In the scene in which she’s first introduced in the film, she drunkenly arrives home with a man whose name she can’t remember; the man also evinces an interest in Barbara Ann, hinting at a ménage involving himself, the mother, and the daughter. Barbara Ann later, tearfully, admits the truth to herself that her mother is a “prostitute.” Marie provides Barbara Ann no emotional support of any kind because she is completely absorbed in the drama of her own life. Her narcissism is represented visually through the device of having her constantly studying her own mirror image. Similarly, Bob (“Bobby Bear”) Bernard’s (Martin West’s) mother, Stella (Ruth Gordon), is portrayed as highly critical (“My son is . . . a total idiot. He takes after his late father”) and domineering. The Mother figure does not offer support, inspiration, or redemption, and therefore I suspect it is no coincidence that the hostile psychiatrist administering the Rorschach (“ink blot”) test to Alan, early in the film, is a woman. I should add that the film is pathologically harsh on women, more so, I think, than the male symbols of authority.
3. “In Young Mr. Lincoln the innocence of the young accused is unambiguous: the brothers, representing simple “manly” virtues, are central to Ford’s idealization of the family, the celebration of family life being central to the film.” As I indicated above, in Lord Love a Duck, Barbara Ann’s parents are acrimoniously divorced (he’s behind on his payments, too), and Stella Bernard’s (Ruth Gordon’s) husband is dead (“We . . . don’t divorce our men, we bury ‘em”). Later, in order for Barbara Ann to achieve her secondary goal (the first being a Hollywood actress) of marrying Bob “Bobby Bear” Barnard, the film’s demiurge figure, Alan Musgrave (McDowall), arranges for Barbara Ann’s mother, Marie, to have an “accident,” overdosing on sleeping pills. Alan’s arranging Marie’s death is never overtly stated, but we are strongly encouraged to make the connection, as he himself says to Barbara Ann that her death must seem an “accident” (rather than to be seen as a cleverly orchestrated murder, committed by him). We are therefore led to believe that Barbara Ann will be complicitous in murder if it is a necessary step for her to achieve her primary and secondary goals. Hence the nurturing role and function of the American family, so idealized in films of Ford, is entirely absent.
4. “Ford presents the lynch mob as essentially good citizens whose energies . . . get temporarily out of control. They need to be reminded of what is “right”—of a fixed and absolute set of values ratified by biblical text—whereupon their basic soundness is reaffirmed.” Although it is not made entirely clear whether the “student body” of Alan’s new high school—“Consolidated”—is composed of children of the dominant classes, it is strongly implied that they are. They are all white, affluent, cliquish, and have clearly internalized the values of extravagant financial expenditure, as indicated by the girls’ awareness of the invidious distinction bestowed by wearing cashmere sweaters, as opposed to the sweater made of inexpensive “synthetic” fabric that Barbara Ann wears early on. After Alan disrupts the graduation ceremony by destroying the staging platform with the tractor—presumably killing “Bobby Bear” (Barbara Ann's first picture is titled Bikini Widow) as well as the members of the school administration—the students and faculty are transformed into a lynch mob that chases him into the school building. He manages to escape their wrath by locking them out (his many keys again suggesting his status as demiurge), and the police gain admittance only by smashing the glass door, thereby allowing them to unlock it. (The police, as authority figures, are also depicted as inept.) The eruption of mob violence would seem to be a “natural” consequence of Alan’s violent actions—the link between violence and male sexuality is implicitly confirmed—but unlike what is often the case in Ford’s work, which as Wood observes is often preoccupied “with the ways in which ‘excess’ energies can be safely contained,” the energies, some destructive, some sexual, shown unleashed in Lord Love a Duck can only be contained, precariously, by a deep act of sublimation, as when Alan, cornered on the roof of the high school building, surrenders to the police. He first orders the police to “stop,” then adopts a sort of Zen-like pose, extending arms to them in an act of submission. Although time and space do not allow me to fully explore the subject, the necessity to sublimate destructive energies seems to me to be one of the film’s preoccupations. As an example, Stella Barnard’s (Ruth Gordon’s) sudden keen taste for alcohol seems to blunt her highly negative and destructive energies. The female psychiatrist’s aggressive attitude toward Alan is blunted, temporarily at least, when she is smoking; principal Emmett’s energies (sexual and otherwise) are blunted by the pencil he’s always putting in his mouth and holding like a dog holds a bone, and so on.
5. “Ford’s idealization of motherhood is central to Young Mr. Lincoln and to the ideology it embodies. The mother is reverenced as the rock on which the family, hence civilization, is built . . . .” In Lord Love a Duck, as in The Chase, the “collapse of confidence in the figure of the Mother . . . points directly to a collapse of confidence in the family structure and, beyond that, in traditional sexual relationships generally.” This latter insight is true of much of Axelrod’s work in general.
6. “It follows from Ford’s veneration of the mother than nothing in Young Mr. Lincoln questions the rightness and sanctity of marriage.” In contrast, nothing in Lord Love a Duck validates the rightness and sanctity of marriage. It is not clear, moreover, that Barbara Ann’s marriage to “Bobby Bear” is ever consummated, and his behavior is often portrayed as Oedipal toward his mother.
7. “In Young Mr. Lincoln the bible . . . is the ultimate sanction, and Lincoln’s authority is seen as God-given.” As Wood points out, in The Chase religion “is reduced to the helpless, absurd and annoying mumblings of Miss Henderson, who is represented as mad.” In Lord Love a Duck, religious services are held at the “First Drive-In Church of Southern California,” where one can “Worship in the Privacy of Your Own Automobile.” We happen to overhear the sermon on the Book of Leviticus, which the minister tells his parish (all in automobiles, parked as if at a drive-in move theater) is “long, confusing, and even boring.” Conventional religion is so marginalized it has ceased to be culturally relevant.
8. “The link between violence and male sexuality, which is implicit and probably unconscious in Young Mr. Lincoln, is fully explicit in The Chase.” Likewise, too, in Lord Love a Duck, as I pointed out above.
9. “Lincoln’s progress in Ford’s film is stimulated by his learning from the books passed on to him by the Clay family: he is guided toward his destiny as President by Ann Rutledge and Blackstone’s Commentaries, by women and nature, law and learning.” In Lord Love a Duck, the concept of progress through learning is debased by technology and economic necessity, as revealed by the brand new “Consolidated” high school being chic, having the latest technology, such as a PA system throughout the school, and elevators. The new technology is also mocked during a scene in which Barbara Ann provocatively raises the principal’s, Mr. Emmett’s, phallic PA microphone to her mouth and blows (into) it, causing Mr. Emmett’s to giggle and wiggle in his chair like an adolescent school boy. Moreover, the school’s very name, “Consolidated,” suggests that the new school was built out of a need for economic “efficiency” by the fictional school system of the film. The aphorism excerpted from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism and quoted (incorrectly) in the opening title sequence (as “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” rather than “A little learning…”) also foregrounds the role of education, but Pope’s famous aphorism is reinterpreted as, “Go To School/Get A Little Knowledge/Live Dangerously.” The meaning of the reinterpretation suggests that true knowledge comes only from experience, as opposed to what is sometimes pejoratively referred to as “book learning.”
10. “Hollywood’s emblems for a lost innocence/happiness suggest a steady descent into disillusionment.” In Young Mr. Lincoln, Wood sees Ann Rutledge, although she is dead, as the “spiritual support” for Lincoln’s career. He also mentions emblems such as Kane’s “Rosebud” and “the river” of Written on the Wind, both emblems representing a lost innocence. There is no comparable image in Lord Love a Duck representing lost innocence, no nostalgic emblem. The only moment remotely suggestive of a kind of childhood innocence is when Alan and Barbara Ann inscribe their names in the wet concrete on the roof of the new “Consolidated” high school. Actually, Alan doesn’t sign his name at all, but rather the name “Mollymauk,” accompanied by the outline of the bird “thought to be extinct, but isn’t.” Indeed, rather than lost innocence, we get the name “Mollymauk,” which uncomfortably rhymes with “muck,” as in the lyrics in Neal Hefti’s title song to the film, with the lines “down on my luck-o/stuck in the muck-o,” referring to “muck and mire,” that is, filth.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Illegal Smile
Last night I watched Ron Mann’s documentary Grass (1999), not so much a social history of marijuana in the United States as an exploration of the government’s attempt, over a roughly 70-year period, to make marijuana possession (and therefore, presumably, its use) a criminal offense of ever-escalating severity. His film is a marvelous compendium of newsreel footage, clips from educational scare films, period music, and feature film excerpts with references to the herb, from the largely unknown (at least to me) High on the Range (1929) to the well-known cautionary tale, Tell Your Children (1936) AKA Reefer Madness. While Mann, to his credit, reveals the extent of the government’s systematic propaganda campaign against marijuana, for which it has, apparently, spent billions upon billions of dollars over the past century or so, the question that remains unexplored in the film is why—why has the U. S. government spent billions and billions of dollars attempting to discredit an rather benign drug, certainly no worse in terms of wasteful cultural expenditure than alcohol?
Perhaps the answer lies in the sort of behavior with which marijuana has been variously associated during the decades explored by the film, for instance, jazz and swing in the 1930s (racial “mixing,” or miscegenation), R&B in the 1950s (juvenile delinquency), psychedelic rock in the 1960s (“free love,” or sexual promiscuity), and the cults of the 1980s (Satanism and goth rock). In other words, the government's campaigns were as much about attacking marijuana as they were attempts to discredit or proscribe certain social behaviors, broadly understood as youthful insolence. As a Victorian—who held the key government position of “drug czar” for over 30 years—Harry J. Anslinger’s campaign against marijuana seems to have been motivated out of a hatred of the anti-Victorian forces and forms of modernism, of which the popular expression in the 1920s and 1930s was jazz and swing, represented by the Afro-American musician. It was therefore motivated out of racism (toward the black jazz artists of the 20s and 30s, but also toward the rock musicians of the 50s and 60s, e.g., Little Richard, Chuck Berry). It would seem that the government’s anti-drug campaign during those decades is roughly analogous to the idea of censorship. While censorship can operate at the level of production (as in the case of “prior restraint,” the prohibition of certain behaviors or practices, for instance), it can also operate before the production stage, meaning it makes certain thoughts literally unthinkable. Racial mixing, or miscegenation, is an example of such a forbidden thought during the swing era. In the rock era, John Prine’s song, “Illegal Smile,” is a wry critique of the sort of censorship that outlaws certain thoughts. Prine has said that the phrase, “illegal smile,” refers not only to the bemused look on a stoned person’s face, but also the “knowing smile” one exchanges with another when each one understands that a joke or reference has violated certain proscribed thoughts—the silent, non-verbal communication, in the form of a smile, that occurs between individuals living under the threat of punitive action. A video of his performance of the song is available here.
Black Sabbath, Sweet Leaf (1971)
Black Uhuru, Sinsemilla (1980)
Brewer and Shipley, One Toke Over the Line (1970)
Cab Calloway and His Orchestra, Reefer Man (1932)
Bob Dylan, Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (1966)
Fraternity of Man, Don’t Bogart Me (1969)
Lil Green, Knockin’ Myself Out (1941)
John Prine, Illegal Smile (1971)
Bessie Smith, Gimme a Reefer (1933)
Steppenwolf, Don't Step on the Grass, Sam (1968)
The Toyes, Smoke Two Joints (1983)
Muddy Waters, Champagne and Reefer (1981)
Saturday, February 6, 2010
"The Music of Savages"
As Ted Gioia observes in The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture (1988), in the early years of jazz studies, the first important critics were European, all of whom employed the discourse of “primitivism,” i.e., they were heavily influenced by the writings of Diderot, Rousseau and the idea of the “noble savage.” As he rightly points out, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “primitive” and “exotic” art started attracting the attention of Western artists and became the sources of new ideas and artistic forms; les choses Africaines “began appearing with great frequency in Paris around 1906” (21). “The idealization and theorization of primitivism in French culture was soon followed by an equally enthusiastic . . . reception for another import from foreign soil,” he writes—American jazz, which arrived in Europe toward the end of World War I, in the form of jazz records brought over by American soldiers (21). In other words, primitivism and exoticism became both a fashion as well as a source for “high” art. Gioia provides an illustration in the form of a quotation by the French critic Charles Delaunay, an early pioneer of jazz studies: “In fact, certain masterpieces of Negro sculpture can compete perfectly well with beautiful works of European sculpture of the greatest periods” (27). Or, in the words of Hugues Panassie, the jazz critic known as “the venerable frog”: “In what way would the music of savages be inferior to that of civilized man?” Many scholars have observed, “Jazz, in particular, has provided the raw material for a critique of the attitudes of white musicians, critics, and listeners drawn to black music culture” (see Georgina Born, Western Music and Its Others, 22). She points to an article by Amiri Baraka published in Downbeat in 1963, titled “Jazz and the White Critic,” in which he points out that one of the distortions of jazz resulted from the treatment of jazz as “natural” and “primitive.”
One need look no further than the work of Belgian critic Robert Goffin, who, in his early work Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan (1944), observed about Louis Armstrong, for instance, “[he] is a full-blooded Negro. He brought the directness and spontaneity of his race to jazz music” (167). Gioia argues that it was Goffin who was the first to formulate the stereotype which has lingered with jazz “until the present day,” the stereotype “which views jazz as a music charged with emotion but largely devoid of intellectual content, and which sees the jazz musician as the inarticulate and unsophisticated practitioner of an art which he himself scarcely understands” (30-31). Gioia calls this “the primitivist myth,” a stereotype which rests upon a belief in the primitive’s unreflective and instinctive relationship with his art. But lest one think the primitivist myth is exclusively European, I should point out that the association of jazz and primitivism was uncritically accepted by American jazz critics once the works of the first European critics reached American shores. Few insightful works were written by Americans in the early years of jazz, primarily because it was generally perceived as both passing fad and as the musical form of a decadent race.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Comments Disabled
For some reason, after a couple of years of existence, my blog is now being targeted for random comments from a location (or locations) overseas. This morning, for instance, I had to go through several past entries, a time-consuming process, and remove the comments, which had absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the blog entry itself. Therefore, reluctantly, I am, for the time being anyway, changing my settings so as to disable comments by anonymous readers. I'm loathe to do this, as normally I learn something from the comments readers take the time to post. However, those who wish to contact me can do so by clicking on the "Contact Sam" link to the right, as well as through my university email address, also listed on this site. After a month or so I'll change the settings back to allowing anonymous comments, but for the time being I'm deactivating it.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
In My Tree
About three weeks ago, I wrote a short blog entry on the famous cynic Diogenes, the great anti-Socratic. Diogenes was greatly admired by Alexander the Great for the freedom exemplified by his way of life. According to legend, the famous conqueror approached the sage on a day when he, Diogenes, was sunning himself. Alexander the Great asked him, Diogenes, if there were anything he could do for him. “Yes,” said Diogenes, “Get out of my light.” It’s said that Diogenes asked to be buried standing on his head, because, so he thought, one day down would be up, and up would be down. In the earlier blog, I claimed that one can hear Diogenesian thought in many pop songs, including Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” when Dylan sings, “You don’t need a weather man/To know which way the wind blows.” One can hear him in the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off Of My Cloud” and in Ian Hunter’s “Standin’ In My Light.” It occurred to me this morning that one may also hear Diogenes in the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” written by John Lennon. I have excerpted a few of the lyrics below:
I was prompted to revisit “Strawberry Fields Forever”—a recording which, in my view, represents one of the Beatles’ finest moments—because according to Dave Haber’s The Internet Beatles Album, it was on this day in 1967 the Beatles shot the night scenes for the “Strawberry Fields Forever” video (available here), in Sevenoaks, Kent. Watching the video this morning, shot over forty years ago, I thought of Jean-Luc Godard’s observation that the cinema also happens to be a documentary record of persons and things at a particular moment in time. Godard said about his film Breathless, for instance, “This film is really a documentary on Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.” Thus the “Strawberry Fields Forever” video is really a documentary recording about how the Beatles looked on 30 January 1967—an example of how photography connects us to what we, even now, still call “the real.”
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Song Of The Vipers
In Chapter 2 (“The Rise of Individualism and the Jazz Solo”) of James Lincoln Collier’s book, Jazz: The American Theme Song (1993), Collier discusses how the forces of modernism enabled the transformation of jazz bands from ensembles to vehicles for soloists. Modernism privileged the individual, championing the virtues of “individualism.” It valued “freedom of the spirit, the virtues of primitivism, belief in living spontaneously . . . and . . . individual expression” (44). Adherence to these values led some to refuse to read, study, or rehearse music, “for fear that a conscious knowing of what they were doing will inhibit spontaneity and the free flow of feeling” (45). However, if modernism privileged freedom of the spirit, primitivism, and spontaneity (the latter expressed in the form of the improvised jazz solo), modernism also was a consequence of the so-called “machine age,” which valued predictability rather than spontaneity, the planned rather than the improvised, and interchangeability (replaceability) rather than individuality.
It’s possible — to theorize a little — that drug use became a fixture of early jazz (sub)culture as a reaction against modernism, that is, the machine age that was dominated by spirit-crushing, that is, mindless and unfulfilling, labor. I’m aware that what was called Romanticism in the nineteenth century was called “Modernism” in the twentieth; drug addiction (such as Charlie Parker’s), as a form of self-destruction, conforms to the Romantic myth of early death as a sign of heightened sensitivity and consciousness. Yet it is also true that the early “drug subcultures” arose in Paris in the early modernist period, the city to which the mercurial Sidney Bechet was drawn in the early 1920s, to the detriment of his recording career in the United States. Among the first of the Parisian drug subcultures (or at least one of the most famous) was the Club des Haschischins, which flourished in Paris in the 1840s and ‘50s. Its members included Charles Baudelaire, Alexander Dumas, Gerald de Nerval, and Théophile Gautier. In the mid-twentieth century, writers such as William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin revived the myth of the “Hashishin” or “Assassins” — a secret group of drug users at odds with the material culture in which they lived — as a way of conceptualizing the modern “drug subculture” or so-called “drug underground.” The important point is to notice the link between esotericism and the individual’s need for a quasi-religious transcendence that can occur only with the secrecy of ritual. “The structure of modern life tends to eliminate possibilities of radical change,” Luigi Zola astutely notes, which is why secret or esoteric societies hold such imaginative power for individuals in modern desacralized urban society (see Mike Jay, Ed., Artificial Paradises 367). Mike Jay has observed that drug subcultures “share many of the underlying dynamics with initiatory secret societies” (Artificial Paradises 366). Such occult or secret societies are premised on initiation ceremonies (employing drugs) allowing individuals access to a higher state of being — what is meant by “high” in the first place. The French expression for being high — “il plane” — expresses the meaning of being high as being metaphorically elevated to a different plane, or level of conscious awareness. The urban jazz subculture, in turn, shared many of the features of a secret society (exclusive membership). “Speaking of 1931,” Louis Armstrong wrote in “Tight Like That Gage,” “we did call ourselves Vipers, which could have been anybody from all walks of life that smoked and respected gage. That was our cute little name for marijuana, and it was a misdemeanor in those days.”
Coupled with what Ted Gioia has called “the primitivist myth” (The Imperfect Art, 1988) that has informed much of the early critical writing about jazz, drug use (or perhaps excessive drug use, addiction) became the imprimatur of authenticity—the positive indication of tortured artistic genius.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
High Infidelity
Friedrich Kittler (Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 1999) argues that from around 1880 on, composers of music have been “allied with engineers” (24). After this date, he writes, “The undermining of articulateness becomes the order of the day” (24). As a consequence of sound recording, noise itself became an object of scientific research, and the previous conceptions that governed musical theory became antiquated.
The phonograph does not hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words, and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such. Articulateness becomes a second-order exception in a spectrum of noise. (23)
Recording is a form of engineering. Consider the composers who became significant since 1887: Schönberg, for instance, Ives, Varèse (all born in the nineteenth century), John Cage (born 1912), and Stockhausen (born 1928). David Morton (Off the Record) indicates that Arnold Schönberg, along with many other composers, writers, and scholars (think of John Lomax, and later Alan, recording folk music “in the field”) became “avid users of sound recording equipment” such as the portable tape recorder (144). (An implication of this development, of course, is that we live in a world in which we will most likely encounter a reproduction of something rather than ever encountering the thing itself.) For tape recording, says David Morton, “destroyed the already tenuous concept of an “original” performance and made the performance a source of content to be refined rather than something to be preserved” (46). Morton cites Steve Jones, who made the observation, “it has become sound—and not music—that is of prime importance in popular music production and consumption” (qtd. in Off the Record, 46). Recently developed (historically speaking) digital recording technologies only made it “easier than ever,” Morton writes, “to create and manipulate new sounds and have little relevance to the concept of high fidelity” (44). Hence the concept of fidelity (truth, accuracy, realism) is no longer relevant when judging a recording (what Kittler calls an “acoustic event”). It must, more than anything, sound good. By way of analogy to the terminology employed in rhetorical theory, perlocution (the effect on the listener) is privileged over elocutio (“purity,” correctness or faithfulness of utterance).
Saturday, January 23, 2010
High Fidelity
The long-playing (“LP”) microgroove record, what is commonly referred to as the vinyl LP, which in its final form held about 20 minutes of music per side, makes sense, as David Morton has observed, only “in the context of the long passages typical of classical music” (Off the Record 38-39). Peter Goldmark and Edward Wallerstein—the CBS employees who after the end of World War II pushed the invention of the “LP” record in that company’s laboratories—had found that the vast majority of classical compositions could fit on two sides of a single record if the storage capacity on each side was around seventeen minutes. Prior to the invention of the long-playing microgroove record, classical recordings were packaged in “albums,” that is, bundles of 78-rpm discs. In their pursuit of a storage medium that could hold 90 percent of all classical music (Morton 38), Goldmark and Wallerstein, perhaps intentionally, linked “high fidelity” with “high brow.” But as Morton points out, while the term fidelity (truth, accuracy) “remains central in the technical vocabulary of music recording and reproduction” (15), an understanding of common music recording practices reveals that sounds are not captured, but made. Nonetheless, companies which issued jazz records, such as Prestige, were formed after CBS' introduction of the long-playing record medium (Prestige, for instance, in 1949).
In contrast, RCA’s introduction in 1948 of the 7” 45-rpm single (which was able to exploit the technical improvements of the LP with the inexpensiveness of the 78-rpm single) was, as Morton observes, “aimed squarely at the largest market in the country,” popular music (155). Serendipitously, jazz music, with its extended improvisations, lent itself to the high fidelity LP format, and so, somewhat improbably, jazz became “high brow.” By 1957, in Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock, jazz music lovers are portrayed as snobs and elitists. Conveniently, a crucial scene in Jailhouse Rock has been recorded by Krin Gabbard in his important work on jazz and the American cinema, Jammin’ at the Margins (1996). The scene takes place at the home of Peggy’s (Judy Tyler’s) parents. Her father, a college professor, is having a party, during which the conversation has turned to jazz music and a jazz figure named “Stubby Ritemeyer,” a fictional musician whom Gabbard indicates is based on West Coast trumpeter-composer Shorty Rogers.
“I think Stubby’s gone overboard with those altered chords,” says one of the pompous guests. “I agree,” says another, “I think Brubeck and Desmond have gone just as far with dissonance as I care to go.” “Oh, nonsense,” says a man, “have you heard Lennie Tristano’s latest recording? He reached outer space.” A young woman adds, “Some day they’ll make the cycle and go back to pure old Dixieland.” A well-dressed, older woman says, “I say atonality is just a passing phase in jazz music.” Turning to Presley, she asks, “What do you think, Mr. Everett?” He answers, “Lady, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” and storms out of the house. (124)
While Gabbard observes in the scene (and movie) a “dizzy mix of black and white music and their imitations” (125), the scene also is about high (jazz) and low (popular) culture, high fidelity—the extradiegetic jazz recording playing the background—and “low” fidelity—the 45-rpm singles Vince Everett (Elvis) wants to record (“Treat Me Nice”). David Morton observes that “high fidelity became a mass market phenomenon after 1952” (39), and that sales of phonographs and high-fidelity equipment grew throughout the 1950s, one consequence of high-fidelity promotional “fairs” that began in 1949. By 1957, of course, Elvis had been signed to RCA, which had made the corporate decision almost a decade earlier to back and heavily to market inexpensive 7” 45-rpm singles to a popular music audience. Elvis, of course, was signed by RCA to produce singles, not LPs.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Portability
Historian David Morton indicates in Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America (2000) that the first significant mass-market success of audio tape technology in America was the “Stereo 8” cartridge system, otherwise known as the 8-Track. Introduced in 1965, the 8-Track was promoted by William Lear (after whom the Learjet is named), who built it “around an existing endless-loop cartridge for background music applications, the Fidelipac” (159). Morton writes:
After modifying the cartridge enough to win a set of patents on it, he [Lear] wisely combined his company’s resources with those of several other top firms: the manufacturing capability of the Motorola corporation, the record catalog of RCA-Victor, and the marketing organization of the Ford Motor Company. (159-60)
Priced at $128, the Ford 8-Track player was instantly successful, and quickly, Morton indicates, “other U.S. auto manufacturers and third-party equipment retailers offered it as early as 1966” (160). Hence the 8-Track’s success was a consequence of its portability, a factor that has determined the direction of research in home electronics and popular music for the past 45 years (think of the small, inexpensive transistor radio). The 8-Track was to the automobile what the Sony Walkman (in the 1980s) was to jogging, revealing the crucial connection between the home audio system and the need for portable music, otherwise known as compatibility. In other words, the crucial factor determining the consumption of popular music the past several decades is not “high fidelity,” but portability. Since World War II and the rise of home audio, the audio manufacturers have typically touted “high fidelity” as a major factor in determining home audio purchases, and while this feature is still no doubt crucial for many enthusiasts (so-called audiophiles), for the majority of consumers, the crucial factor is mobility. Hence, like so much other cultural activity, the automobile has organized our behavior.
The compact disc brought about the demise of audio tape technology, replacing the cassette (which replaced the 8-Track) with the iPod. Hence the iPod is to the CD what cassettes and 8-Tracks were to the vinyl LP. Reshuffling (randomization) replaces the predictability (stability) of the record, and the déclassé technology assumes the status of a found object, the technological equivalent of the fossil record. The archeologist is replaced by the antiquarian.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Spindrift
There’s an old saw that avers suffering transforms the common man into a philosopher, and this may express a certain truth. In one of her poems, Emily Dickinson uses “lead” as a metaphor to approximate mental and emotional suffering: “After great pain a formal feeling comes,” during which “The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs.” She goes on to write:
Traditionally, lead has been associated with the planet Saturn; hence, the emotional feeling Dickinson is trying to describe by “the hour of lead” is called saturnine. Freud suggested the mental energy required for this “letting go” was the difference between mourning and melancholy. In his Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1985), Italo Calvino suggests that “melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness,” just as “humor is comedy that has lost its bodily weight” (19). Calvino also observes that the ancients thought the saturnine temperament the one “proper to artists, poets, and thinkers, and that seems true enough. Certainly literature would never have existed if some human beings had not been strongly inclined to introversion, discontented with the world as it is, inclined to forget themselves for hours and days on end to fix their gaze on the immobility of silent worlds” (52). Calvino contrasts the saturnine temperament with the mercurial one, the former “melancholy, contemplative, and solitary,” the latter, mercurial one, “inclined toward exchanges and commerce and dexterity” (52). I can think of no better poetic example of the contemplative, solitary artistic temperament than that of Dylan Thomas’ “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” in which Thomas writes:
My astrological sign is Cancer, the crab, one who carries his home on his back. Hence my temperament is to prefer the solitary. Perhaps for this reason, I’ve always been attracted to Thomas’ poem, and especially the description of his writing as “spindrift pages.” Spindrift typically refers to the telltale spray blown from cresting waves during gale force winds, but the word is also used to describe the fine sand that is blown off the tips of sand dunes, or the fine snow that the wind blows off the top edges of snow drifts. Thomas’ “spindrift pages” are those pages that are whisked like fine snow from his writing desk, destined for an unknown reader, or perhaps no reader at all. Therefore, for me the image that best captures the saturnine temperament, or melancholy, is one of the ocean, or desert, or hilltop that displays the telltale wisps of spindrift. My personal image of melancholy is not necessarily one that is common or widely endorsed, of course, because it partakes of the wholly personal and private, eluding public endorsement. The musical equivalent of melancholy is perhaps private as well, just as the personal image of melancholy is, and so my list of some melancholic songs may not match those of others.
Glen Campbell – Wichita Lineman
Neil Diamond – Solitary Man
Elton John – Rocket Man
The Grateful Dead – Box of Rain
The Left Banke – Walk Away Renee
Harry Nilsson – Everybody’s Talkin’
Phil Ochs – Boy in Ohio
Roy Orbison – In Dreams
Gilbert O’Sullivan – Alone Again, Naturally
Quicksilver Messenger Service – Spindrifter
Marty Robbins – Saddle Tramp
Bob Seger – Turn the Page
XTC – My Bird Performs
Neil Young – After the Gold Rush
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Pastiche
According to John Tobler’s This Day In Rock (Carroll & Graf, 1993), Led Zeppelin’s first album (cover pictured) was released 41 years ago today, on 17 January 1969, during the band’s first American tour. Other sources, however, aver it was released a few days earlier, on 12 January. Perhaps the release dates for the album were different in Britain and America, but in any case the lack of positivistic certainty regarding the album's release date is as elusive as the music the band played—what is it? Led Zeppelin’s music has often been characterized as “heavy metal”—but what is that? Heavy metal as idea, heavy metal as product, heavy metal as mass phenomenon—which one is heavy metal? It has often been observed that Led Zeppelin was to the Seventies what the Beatles were to the Sixties, and there may be some truth to this claim, assuming one believes that the history of rock is the history of a few moments of genuine authentic expression that quickly deteriorates into what might be called “commercial” imitations employing a similar sound—e.g., Led Zeppelin devolves into Heart.
Perhaps there is another way to conceptualize the band’s music. As Ingeborg Hoesterey has observed (Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature, 2001), the term “pastiche” is often used in a negative sense, but the term can be understood more positively. While her study is predominantly interested in the visual arts, she does touch briefly on popular music, observing, “pastiche structuration has been a feature of innovative popular music for more than a decade, registered for the most part under different labels” (p. 112). Her use of the term “pastiche” in this context refers to the conflation or mixing of different kinds of music, the creation of “impure” blends including “funk-rap-rock,” “hiphop/techno/jungle,” “country and hiphop,” “Afro-Celtic,” “Afro-Pop,” “Ethno-Punk,” and so on (p. 113). Whatever one wishes to call it—“hard rock,” “heavy metal,” rock-infused blues and folk—Led Zeppelin’s music was pastiche—a flagrant, ostentatious borrowing from the musical archive of Western culture. A conceptually elusive term, the term pastiche rather obviously has fuzzy boundaries, overlapping with a number of other aesthetic categories. I have extracted of few of these categories from Hoesterey’s book and used them below. The term pastiche overlaps with a number of semantic categories, and I have listed only a few of them here, for purposes of illustration.
Appropriation – A term that gained widespread use in the eighties to stress the “intentionality of the act of borrowing and the historical attitude of the borrower” (p. 10). In the Sixties, the blues, along with folk, came to represent authenticity, what Simon Frith has labelled the widespread perception of “music-as-expression” (as opposed to “music-as-commodity”). White blues musicians considered African-American music as “authentic,” an outpouring of genuine feeling, and authenticity was defined by closeness to the blues. To play authentically, therefore, was to play the blues. Among other kinds of music, Led Zeppelin appropriated the blues, primarily electrified Chicago blues. While “Chicago blues” most certainly was the effect of industrialization (requiring an industry and circulation), Led Zeppelin appropriated the music of Chicago blues artists such as Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf, sometimes without the proper attribution of authorship (e.g., “How Many More Times”). Of course, the music industry had exploited the music of Afro-Americans for commercial profit since the jazz era—it literally banked on their music . . . as did the members of Led Zeppelin. For how appropriation is linked to imitation, see below.
Bricolage – The bricoleur describes a “creative persona who draws his/her work upon heterogeneous models and sources” (p. 10). A number of sources claim Led Zeppelin incorporated rockabilly, reggae, soul, funk, classical, Celtic, Indian, Arabic, pop, Latin, and country. Hence the band members can be considered legitimate bricoleurs.
Farrago – “One of the meanings of pasticcio [from which the French-language word pastiche comes] in common Italian is ‘mental confusion’” (p. 12). Hence the origin of Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused,” a farrago.
Imitation – “The basic structure of pastiche is a degree of imitation. What happens beyond this determines the artistic sense of both the traditional and postmodern pastiche” (p. 12). The band’s first album includes a cover of Otis Spann’s “I Can’t Quit You Baby" and the aforementioned “How Many More Times” first recorded by Howlin' Wolf. It also is worth mentioning that in their stage performance Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, to use Krin Gabbard's phrase (Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture, 2004), were “borrowing black masculinity,” that is, imitating the performance styles of the black artists they admired. Gabbard cites John Gennari on the subject of the white male appropriation of black masculinity, suggesting that it “operates through gender displacement, i.e., sexual freedom and carefree abandon . . . [being] . . . expressed through feminized gestures (emotion, flamboyance, etc.) that, paradoxically, end up coded as masculine. I think here of Elvis's hair styling . . . Mick Jagger's striptease . . . the spandex, long-hair, girlish torsos of the cock rockers. To try to get this point across to my students, I show footage of . . . Robert Plant and Jimmy Page talking about how everything they did came out of Willie Dixon and other macho black bluesmen. Then you see them aggressively pelvic thrusting through “Whole Lotta Love,” looking like Cher and Twiggy on speed.” (Gabbard, Black Magic p. 33)
Refiguration – The art of refiguration “takes formal elements of past styles, and brings them forward into a contemporary context, resulting in a sometimes disquieting synthesis of past form and present context” (pp. 12-13) Led Zeppelin’s extraordinarily loud, spacey and druggy refiguration of the Chicago blues might in fact be what is meant by the term “heavy metal.”
Friday, January 15, 2010
Wild Civility
The soundtrack to the film Pretty Woman (1990) contains Christopher Otcasek’s cover version of Johnny O’Keefe’s 1958 hit, “The Wild One” in its retitled form, “Real Wild Child (Wild One).” The serendipitous linkage is highly revealing, as it suggests that “wildness,” as opposed to “civility,” concerns the projection of proper social behavior, that is, decorum (social appearance), or what we now call “image management.” For the dramatic intrigue of Pretty Woman revolves around the issue of how to behave properly, socially speaking. The special problem of the film is how the Julia Roberts character, a prostitute, must learn proper social decorum from below. Rather like Eliza Doolittle (My Fair Lady), she must make the difficult transition from an ill-mannered street waif (low) to proper lady (high). But the story demands she make this complex negotiation from (private) individual goodness to (public) spiritual elegance (conferred by exposure to “high” culture, such as opera) look easy, and eventually commit to a higher love (monogamy).
Robert Herrick’s much-anthologized poem, “Delight in Disorder,” from which the expression “wild civility” comes, is a poem that interrogates Neoclassical assumptions of decorum—that is, the management of social appearances, the courtier’s emulation of correct models of behavior as set forth by Castiglione (and others). Herrick expresses a certain erotic interest in women who exhibit a “wild civility,” or, in modern parlance, engage in “double articulation,” speaking two different messages to two audiences using one (symbolic) utterance. “Wildness” as such therefore might be understood as a form of Bakhtinian “carnival,” mocking and subverting the mainstream culture rather than a form of “harmless” fun. Hence being “wild” isn’t just about having fun, but about mockery and subterfuge.
The Beach Boys – Wild Honey
Brook Benton – Walk on the Wild Side (from the motion picture)
Donald Byrd – Wild Life
Marshall Crenshaw – Little Wild One (No. 5)
Duran Duran – The Wild Boys
The Escape Club – Wild Wild West
INXS – Wild Life
Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch – Wildside
Paul McCartney & Wings – Wild Life
Mötley Crüe – Wild Side
Johnny O’Keefe – The Wild One AKA Real Wild Child (Wild One)
The Peddlers – Walk on the Wild Side
Lou Reed – Walk on the Wild Side
Dan Seals – (You Bring Out) The Wild Side of Me
Slaughter – The Wild Life
Steppenwolf – Born To Be Wild
Talking Heads – Wild Wild Life
Hank Thompson – The Wild Side of Life
The Troggs – Wild Thing
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Auteurism
French filmmaker Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) has died, at age 89, and has been widely written about and eulogized, even by commentators who obviously have seen only a handful of his films. This article by Agnès Poirier, for instance, gets the biographical details correct, although she overemphasizes his contribution to the French Nouvelle Vague, calling him the movement’s “father,” when in fact Rohmer was neither revolutionary in his aesthetics, as was Godard, nor audacious in his film criticism, as was Truffaut—after all, Rohmer didn’t make his first film until he was almost 40 years old. She is no doubt correct, though, in her observation that Rohmer “always followed Rimbaud’s mantra: ‘One must be absolutely modern’,” but then the same also could be said of Godard and Truffaut. Rohmer’s first film that actually showed an active interest in exploring the lives of adventurous young moderns, La Collectionneuse (filmed late 1966, released 1967), was made when he was 46. Featuring Haydée Politoff (pictured left), Patrick Bauchau (right), his wife Mijanou Bardot, and painter Daniel Pommereulle, one would be hard-pressed to say his film unequivocally embraced the sexual mores (and, in one instance, drug use) of hip Parisian bohemians (at least as Rohmer saw them) of the 1960s. According to Sally Shafto (in her important monograph, The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968, published 2000), Rohmer cast La Collectionneuse with individuals he perceived to be at the forefront of the “Sixties Generation,” in their behavior, attitude, and sensibility. A revealing fact is that Rohmer refused to cast the painter Frédéric Pardo in the film because he thought his hair was too long.
The first film by Rohmer I actually saw in a movie theater was The Marquise of O (1976), which I found utterly fascinating and have always found to be his best film. Ironically, although it is perhaps his most feted film behind My Night at Maud’s (1969)—which I didn’t see until its home video incarnation well over two decades after it’s release—it’s typically neglected in favor of the films that comprise the Six Moral Tales, privileged by critics, I suspect, because they themselves were ambivalent about the provocative sexual lives and sensibilities of young people in the 60s. Although compared by some to a painter, it was actually Robert Bresson—who died just over ten years ago, in December 1999—who’d studied to be a painter, and with whom Rohmer most closely identified, even if Bresson was the better filmmaker. As a consequence of his death, many writers have written rhapsodically about his films, but it seems strange to me that they ignore what was his most significant contribution to film studies—the formation of the auteur theory. For it was the book on Alfred Hitchcock that he co-authored with Claude Chabrol, titled simply Hitchcock and published in 1957 soon after the release of Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), that not only bolstered Hitchcock’s critical reputation but was a foundational work of auteur criticism—but not the Nouvelle Vague (they are not synonyms). Hence I would like to see Rohmer’s contribution to the formation of the auteur theory acknowledged every bit as much as his films, for in a very real sense he made the important contribution of making modern film studies thinkable in the first place.
I have found this article by Dave Kehr to be the most balanced of the many obituaries to be found on the web.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Hey! Ho! Let's Go!
Songs with nonsense syllables serve to remind us that American music since the jazz era always has been more a matter of sound than sense—scat singing is perhaps the prototype in this regard—but the more important issue is the privileging of sound over sense. These types of songs also reveal the difficulty of writing about music, since those critics who find it difficult if not impossible to write about music as music tend to overappreciate the lyrics, especially those lyrics having a so-called “political” theme. Of course, rock was political—but not because of what it said (think of Elvis appearing on the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show in 1956 singing “Flip Flop & Fly,” which prompted any number of critics to condemn rock as the sort of music enjoyed by cretinous goons), but because of its revolutionary sound. Indeed, early on, people didn’t even know what to call rock music. As is well known, it was Alan Freed who popularized the use of the term “rock and roll,” but before that the music was often called “bop” (as in Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula”), after the postwar rise of “bebop” or “rebop” to describe the contemporary form of jazz, these latter words probably derived from “Arriba! Arriba!” (essentially, C'mon! Let’s go!) used by Latin American bandleaders to strike up their bands. The R&B mutation known as “doo-wop” also popularized the use of nonsense syllables, but there are many instances of its use—Lionel Hampton’s R&B hit “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop” from 1946 is an example—in the years prior to Elvis’s popularization of rock ‘n’ roll in 1956. We musn’t forget Frank Sinatra’s famous scat singing consisting of “dobedobedo,” of course, nor should we forget Scooby Doo’s immortal, “Scooby Dooby Doo!”
The Beatles – I Am the Walrus
The Crystals – Da Doo Ron Ron
The Edsels – Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong
Shirley Ellis – The Name Game
Lionel Hampton – Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop
Little Richard – Tutti Frutti
Barry Mann – Who Put the Bomp (in The Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)
Manfred Mann – Do Wah Diddy Diddy
The Marcels – Blue Moon
The Merry Macs – Mairzy Doats
Roy Orbison – Ooby Dooby
The Police – Da Doo Doo Doo, De Da Da Da
Slim and Slam – The Flat Foot Floogee (With The Floy Floy)
Frank Sinatra – Strangers in the Night
The Ramones – The Blitzkrieg Bop
Gene Vincent – Be-Bop-A-Lula
Friday, January 8, 2010
The Ghost Has Left The Building
Were he alive today, this would have been the human Elvis Presley’s 75th birthday. The story is quite familiar: he was born in 1935 to parents Vernon and Gladys at their home in Tupelo, Mississippi, arriving 35 minutes after his stillborn twin, Jesse Garon, buried in a shoebox in an unmarked grave. The human Elvis died in 1977 at age 42, thirty-three years ago next August, leaving a sole heir, Lisa Marie, born 1968. The Elvis brand still makes tons of money—for years Forbes has ranked Elvis among the top-earning dead celebrities. In 2009, dead Elvis earned roughly $55 million. With a new “Viva Elvis!” Cirque du Soleil show opening in Las Vegas, he is projected to top that figure this year. The place Elvis once owned and called home, Graceland, is the second most visited house in America after the White House, averaging about 700,000 visitors per year. Sales of Elvis CDs and records purportedly have topped one billion. There are more than 350 “official” Elvis Presley Fan Clubs around the world.
But there is another Elvis, an Elvis whose image has come free of his body and moves around the world seemingly enjoying itself, an Elvis who, figuratively speaking, lives on, and not just in the form of impersonators. Greil Marcus calls this free-floating Elvis image “dead Elvis,” and even wrote a book about it, titled Dead Elvis (1991). Marcus called this Elvis “an emptied, triumphantly vague symbol of displaced identity” (p. 33), but it also happens to be the condition of the android, the experience of the ghost having left the building. You can find this Elvis on coffee mugs, ashtrays, crushed black velvet, ties, T-shirts, scarfs, wine labels, billboards, Pez dispensers, limited edition dinner plates, clock faces, and appropriated for album covers. You can find it all over. It’s ubiquitous. Elvis’s meteoric rise to prominence roughly coincided with the new technology of television, so in a sense Elvis has always been an image, in a way like, for instance, Princess Diana, but unlike Elvis, she didn’t actually do anything. Elvis, at least, sang and made some feature films.
The Elvis image is, in fact, the brand of a corporation known as Elvis Presley Enterprises (EPE). What EPE did was to go around the world gathering up all the free-floating images of Elvis, collecting these images for its own purposes. So what is being celebrated today isn’t the birthday of Elvis, but Elvis the android, the ghost who’s left the building, a brand manufactured by EPE. Whose birthday are we, in fact, celebrating? Or rather, what?
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Behold! A Plucked Chicken
According to legend, at the point when Aristotle and his students had refined their definition of “man” to a creature having the qualities of “featherless biped,” the cynic Diogenes burst in holding aloft a plucked chicken, and announced, “Behold, your man!” Legend also has it that Diogenes lived in a large tub (or barrel, as depicted in many paintings), and purportedly walked through the streets of Athens in the daytime carrying a lamp, claiming to be looking for an honest man. Immodestly, he performed all bodily functions in public, and when criticized for publicly masturbating, replied he wished he could satisfy hunger merely by rubbing his stomach. Greatly admired by Alexander the Great for the freedom exemplified by his way of life, the great conqueror approached the cynical sage on a day when he, Diogenes, was sunning himself. Alexander the Great asked him if there were anything he could do for him. “Yes,” said Diogenes, “Get out of my light.” It is also reported that he asked to be buried standing on his head, because, so he thought, one day down would be up, and up would be down.
We find Diogenes to be quite modern, for he was the anti-Socrates. We can hear Diogenes in Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” when Dylan sings, “You don’t need a weather man/To know which way the wind blows.” We can hear him in the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off Of My Cloud.” We can also hear him in Muddy Waters’ brutal honesty:
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Cool Sounds
The weather outside is frightful—“bone-chilling,” as the saying goes, in order to suggest, I suppose, the coldness of the grave. Hence, given the bitterly cold weather, it seems entirely appropriate to ponder the ecology of ice. As Eric G. Wilson has shown (The Spiritual History of Ice), at the turn of the nineteenth century, ice became auratic—it was endowed with aura, or believed to have magical or perhaps holy (spiritual) qualities—frozen shapes were not, in fact, dead, “but bearers of vital powers.” Wilson argues crystals, glaciers, and the poles were seen “as revelations of life as well as models of poetic composition” (or perhaps, re-composition). Indeed, ice came to embody scientific, psychological, and even occult insights. Jungian scholar and psychologist M. L. von Franz, in Man and His Symbols observed:Yet the dreaded image of the so-called “ice princess,” alluring and beautiful, but emotionally (or spiritually) dead, has captured the modern imagination. Flattened expressive affect, or emotional “distance” (as opposed to proximity or closeness as authenticity), became metaphorically imagined as both blue and cold, as in Hank Williams’ country-blues standard, “Cold, Cold Heart.” Some say the world will end in fire, and some say ice (both used as spiritual emblems, incidentally), but I think the singers of the following songs say ice.
Pat Benatar – Fire And Ice
Albert Collins – Icy Blue
Duran Duran – Silent Icy River
Foreigner – Cold As Ice
John Hiatt – Icy Blue Heart
Jefferson Airplane – Ice Age
Joy Division – Ice Age
Gucci Mane – Icy
Sarah McLachlan – Ice
Pink Floyd – The Thin Ice
Vanilla Ice – Ice Ice Baby
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Thoughts On Year Two
Yesterday represented the second anniversary of 60x50. As of yesterday, I have posted 395 entries on this blog, which averages out to about one post every forty-two hours over the past two years—or one every other day for the past two years. The number of posts this past year was down from the first, which I’d predicted in my reflections on year one at this time last year. I realized that I could not continue to blog at the same pace. The first year I managed to write 219 posts, while this past year I posted 174 entries—down 45 posts from the year before. That may seem like a substantial decline, until you do the math—on average, down fewer than four posts a month. As I have stated before, the research component for many of my posts is extensive, although I don’t mind doing it, and while I hope readers have found my research valuable, I have done it “for free.” But that’s fine, because I’ve taught myself something, and that’s the whole point of blogging in the first place, at least for me—to learn something I didn’t know.
Therefore, the task I set for myself with 60x50 (you can read the full explanation on the right)—to find a process that will bring about new things I would not have thought of if I had not started to say them—has, for the most part, been successful. I have discovered things by writing on this blog, things I would not have learned had I not imposed this writing requirement upon myself. All in all the experience has been a positive one. I’ve also found it interesting, for instance, to learn which of my posts has received the most hits over the past year—the entry on Gram Parsons’ Nudie suit. I never would have predicted that, but that’s one of the interesting things you learn by maintaining a blog. The post titled When the Whip Comes Down, prompted by some thoughts I had on re-watching Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock (the whipping scene, obviously), has also done quite well (posted December 2008, however, not in 2009). Interestingly, there is a high number of web searches on the subject of “whipping scenes in movies,” for reasons I cannot imagine. Perhaps more surprising is the fact that the post in which I discussed the meaning of “the great speckled bird” has also received a rather significant number of hits.
The downside, of course, is the amount of work this blog requires, but I’m repurposing it for the next few months so as to have it function in a new, and I think better, way for me. I’m going to incorporate my blog as part of a class I’m teaching this spring on “electronic literacy.” One of the requirements of the class is for the students to start up a blog (which they may take down at the end of the semester) not only in order to experience writing in an electronic environment, but also to require them to flex their writing muscle more than they may do normally. Therefore, once in awhile my posts may seem focused on narrowly academic issues or questions, but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up my usual ruminations on the subject of popular music. In fact, I’m teaching my “Writing About Popular Music” course again this spring, so some topics may pop up as a consequence of teaching that course as well. Students will be free to visit my blog to learn my thoughts on various subjects related to class discussions, in addition to the Blackboard discussion board I will also moderate. Hence I’m going to make this blog work for me in a way that it hasn’t done the past couple of years, making it a part of my teaching duties rather than an “outside” activity that seems disconnected from them. I do hope that returning readers continue to find my blog as engaging as ever, but a consequence of this slight change in purpose may change occasionally the nature of the posts, at least for the next four months.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Devil’s Dictionary of Pop I
A short list of caustic aphorisms inspired by Ambrose Bierce (pictured), who wrote the first Devil’s Dictionary (1911).
British Invasion: Sound bite, descriptive of a marketing phenomenon as much as an actual movement.
Acid Rock: Sound bite, once (mistakenly) used to refer to any song that referred to drugs; no longer an especially useful collocation, for which we can be thankful.
Bubblegum: Psychedelic rock with its objectionable (drug) elements removed; the contemporary equivalent of a fat-free product.
Groovy: Antiquated term for anything about which the speaker expressed approbation; now déclassé, for which we can be thankful.
Rock Festival: Once the name for the logistical nightmare of holding a sock hop outdoors. Legendary for the wasteful expenditure of non-renewable natural resources, now highly impractical.
Schlock Rock: Any rock music that is considered “trash,” as long as one understands there is worthwhile or valuable schlock, and actual schlock.
Jam Session: Another name for noodling, meaning to play without purpose or direction. Intoxicants are essential.
Space Rock: See Schlock Rock.
Country Rock: Dismissed by the late Gram Parsons as “plastic dry-fuck.” See also Schlock Rock.
45: Antiquated music storage technology in the form a vinyl record 7” in diameter, typically with a song on each side. Now repurposed as coasters.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Blue Moon
Roughly every four weeks, or about every twenty-eight days, a full moon rises, which normally means there are twelve full moons a year. But last month, there was a full moon on December 2—and another last night, on December 31. The second full moon in the same month is conventionally referred to as a “blue moon,” the source of the expression, “Once in a blue moon.” Since a blue moon occurs only every two to three years, there are therefore only forty or so blue moons in any given century. It also means that the year that features a blue moon has thirteen moons, as did 2009, for instance. Has the association of the number thirteen with the blue moon led to the popular superstition that a blue moon is a sign of bad luck, or at least some sort of misfortune?
Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” released by Columbia Records in 1947, is a conventional country (hillbilly) ballad that speaks of the sorrow of heartbreak:
As is clear, the song isn’t about a blue moon in the conventional sense—rather, it puns on the conventional meaning of a blue moon—but is an instance of the so-called pathetic fallacy, the description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that attributes to them human emotions, sensations, and feelings. John Ruskin coined the term “pathetic fallacy,” and used as an example of it the lines from Kingsley’s Alton Locke:
George P. Landow explains:
But when Elvis got hold of the song, he read it aberrantly, no longer as a ballad. He transformed “Blue Moon of Kentucky” into a song, not of loss, but of love regained. In the process, he also invented rockabilly, which, as Michael Jarrett observes, “was to country music as bebop was to swing.” For rockabilly “signaled a paradigm shift: not harmony and melody, but rhythm and sound—echo from a twangy guitar, slapped bass, pounding piano, or a dixie-fried voice—became the raison d'être of popular music” (Sound Tracks, p. 162).
